My family and I just got back from visiting our son in Europe. I spent most of December there because I wanted to go on a road trip with my son. We visited The Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, and when the rest of the family came, we went to Paris, France.
Nearly all the places were over run with tourists and locals but the real pain was in Paris. There were extremely long lines and wait times for every major tourist attraction such as the Louvre, Musée de l’Orangerie, Eiffel Tower, and Notre Dame to name a few. Cafes and restaurants were packed even for winter!
I know what you’re thinking, “you should have planned better” and maybe I should have bought tickets online weeks or months ago? Well it wouldn’t have mattered because even people with pre-paid tickets for specific times had to wait in long lines. Those lines did move a bit faster but everyone had to wait to matter what and it ate up too much of our valuable time. For the Louvre, we ended up buying an overpriced guided tour tickets to get in faster and our guide was disappointed we ditched her as soon as we crossed the ticket gate but we didn’t want to spend hours listening to her and follower her around, we wanted to see specific items in the Louvre. If you’re not familiar with the museum, it’s huge and it would take days to see all of it so you have to pick and choose your battles and decide what’s the best bang for your buck.
As you may have noticed, every one of my posts includes an image inspired by a 16th to 18th century artist created by AI. I love art but my drawing and painting capabilities are limited to stick figure drawings at least until I found AI and I’ve been generating a huge library of images that I like to create for myself.
Above is an example and it’s takes a long complex prompt to generate something like this and while artists like Jules Lenepveu, Giovanni Serodine, Cortona, Guercino, Poussin, Reni and Turchi may have been experts with paint and canvas, I’d like to think I’m an expert with words (prompts) to create great works of art!
I also love contemporary art as well but restrictions on copyright make it impossible to replicate them without jumping through extra hoops.
Abu Dahbi – The Solution?
One evening, I was literally griping to my wife about the long wait times and over tourism and said to her, “what the world needs is 3 more Paris’ and 3 more Louvre’s!”
I kid you not, we flipped on the TV and saw a Bloomberg interview from David Rubenstein with Mohamed Khalifa Al Mubarak, the Cultural minister of Abu Dahbi talking about their own version of the Louvre, Guggenheim Museum and other cultural centers they have opened!
We are already talking about taking a trip there in 2025 if we can swing it because we’re also planning a cruise around South America in 2025 and other events so it’ll be tricky to fit in to the schedule but we want to go!
Abu Dhabi Culture Website
If you’re intrigued as much as we are here’s a great starting point website. AbuDhabiculture.ae
I loved Paris and the other places we visited and we thought we wouldn’t be dealing with huge crowds considering we were going there in the winter but we were mistaken. My wife and I plan on going back to Paris and perhaps live there for 1 to 3 months to get a better fuller and richer experience but it’ll need to be at the absolute low season because neither of us wants to sit in very long lines and deal with huge crowds.